At the Reunion Buffet

When Isabel Dalhousie opens her Edinburgh home for a school reunion, she expects awkward conversations and the mild discomfort of facing the past. What she doesn't expect are secrets that have been quietly festering for decades, or the moral complexity of deciding when forgiveness is genuinely warranted and when it might be something more troubling altogether. Alexander McCall Smith keeps the stakes intimate and deeply human — this is a story about what we owe each other across the years, and whether old wounds ever truly close.

At just eighty pages, this novella is a small, precise thing — and that compression is entirely the point. McCall Smith strips away everything but the essential pleasures of his writing: the gentle philosophical asides, the sharp social observation tucked inside polite sentences, and Isabel's particular way of turning a dilemma over like a stone to examine what lives underneath. Readers already fond of the series will find it a satisfying concentrated dose of everything they love about Isabel; newcomers will discover that McCall Smith can establish a full moral world in the time it takes to finish an evening's reading.